Thank you to both of you, I guess trying to fit in the syllable count is virtually impossible, though I have a few questions.Doesn't insa work as a preposition making lon or tawa redundant? Is it used otherwise only to specifically say that it is inside something?When do I have to use pi exactly? I would have thought that using it before tan would be wrong.I had seen somewhere that if the subject isn't directly affected by the action that it wouldn't have "e". I assumed that the same would go for thinking about something since that something isn't really changed by you thinking it.I really appreciate you taking your time to correct it. mi tawa

‘insa’ is a noun and so comes into a prepositional phrase as the object of the preposition. The English object of the English preposition “inside” then appears as a modifier of that noun. So “inside the house” is ‘lon insa tomo’ and so on for other spatial/bodypart terms. Only ‘poka’ has become a preposition in its own right and that with a different meaning from ‘lon poka x’.

‘pi’ introduces a unitary modifier of more than one word (but not numbers). So a prepositional phrases modifying a noun or a verb needs ‘pi' (since it is always at least two words long).

The rule about ‘e’ and Direct Objects (not subjects) is simply that every DO requires ‘e’ and a DO is simply the first noun that goes with a transitive verb after the subject. The action of the verb doesn’t have to affect the object at all: seeing a thing doesn’t affect the thing seen at all but ‘lukin’ is tranitive, so the thing gets mentioned as the DO; ‘lukin e ijo’. The line of chat you cite seems to have turned up first as part of trying to explain why ’tawa’ (for example) doesn’t introduce the place gone to by ‘e’, since (it is said) my going there does affect it (but doesn’t it?). The real reason is simply that ‘tawa’ is not a transitive verb (in the cases referred to) but a preposition, which doesn’t use ‘e’. As for thinking, ‘pilin’ is a transitive verb, so it has a DO which takes ‘e’. (Whether thinking about something changes it is a messy question, but not one we need to get into, since it has nothing to do with the issue.)